The Manual Manual: Your guide to learning creative handwork

If work is a four-letter word, leisure your escape, and neither satisfies, then The Manual Manual is your antidote.

Through the personal experience of the author, a designer and woodworker of 40 years experience, and extensive interviews with a wide range of craftspeople, this book explores the satisfactions of creative handwork, whether as a profession or hobby. Offering a detailed guide to how anyone can access and master the hand craft of your choice, The Manual Manual is a practical response to improve the quality of your life against the stresses of the Digital Age.

Before industrialization, making things for the people in our lives was how our species survived and thrived. Hand work was all work, and it was the central, joyful process of life. Creative making was our purpose. Today, we work because we must. To make smartphones and electric cars, work has become industrialized and digitized. It can be hard to find purpose or value in our jobs when they are insignificant contributions to giant enterprises. Driven by necessity and fear, we believe that success, or that the idle leisure it buys, will eventually make us happy. But instead we pay for our modern technology with increasing rates of depression and anxiety.

Pleasure is the original motivation for work, feeling fully alive its reward.

We can't all quit our day jobs and survive in the Digital Age. But we can access the joy of workmanship--and truly pursue happiness--by finding creative work that fits our inclinations.

This book is your guide to access the deeply pleasurable, satisfying, and meaningful process of making things by hand, whether as a hobby or a profession.

Strother Purdy is a woodworker by choice, nearly an academic by trade, and a writer by night. This is his third book. He is holding his grandfather's spokeshave.